M-PESA Africa has announced that it has reached 50 million monthly active customers, strengthening its position as Africa’s largest fintech. Since its inception more than 14 years ago in Kenya, M-PESA is now available in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, DRC, Lesotho, Ghana and Egypt.
The milestone comes just 18 months after Safaricom and Vodacom launched the M-PESA Africa Joint Venture to accelerate growth of the service across Africa.
In 2007, Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-PESA in Kenya as a platform for customers to instantly send money to each other. For many customers, the service became their first and often only access to financial services propelling its fast growth and adoption across the country.
Today, M-PESA is a 2-sided network that provides a wide variety of financial services to both businesses and individual customers. Customers can send and receive money, make and receive business payments, pay bills, make and receive international money transfers, save and access credit, all from the convenience of their mobile phones and wherever they may be in the countries served across more than 500,000 agents.
In June 2021, Safaricom launched the M-PESA App across all its markets. The M-PESA Super App introduced one of the service’s key innovations in the form of Mini-Apps which enable customers and businesses to accomplish day-to-day tasks from shopping to accessing government services without having to download different apps for each task.
In addition, the M-PESA Super App provides the more than 50 million customers with a modern, intuitive and secure way to transact on their smartphones.
Into the future, the service has been investing in new technologies and partnerships as it seeks to deepen financial health amongst its customers through products that encourage savings and lending, wealth management, and insurance.
“14 years ago, we launched M-PESA to connect our customers to each other and to different opportunities. We are delighted to celebrate this remarkable milestone with our more than 50 million customers across the continent. As an honour to this achievement, we are reiterating our commitment and deepening our focus on more innovations that will further transform the lives of our customers,” said Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, MD M-PESA Africa.